Hide Removable Drive Icons from your Ubuntu

If you have used Ubuntu you must be aware about the fact that it makes a desktop icon for each removable drive that is attached to the system. This creates a mess on the desktop making it appear chaotic. For those of you who like to keep only important icons on the desktop, this article is a must read. The article discusses as to how you can hide the removable drive icons from your Ubuntu Desktop.

Many of you must have tried hands at deleting the removable drive icons such as Media, mp3, backups, sda1, etc. Some of you, especially the new users, might even have tried to disable the option of creation of such icons. But all in vain as there is no such option by way of which you can stop the creation of these icons. However, you can hide these removable drive icons to keep your desktop clean. This can be done by following the below mentioned steps:

Open Ubuntu’s registry editor by typing gconf-editor in the Alt+F2 run dialog

Now, go to apps > nautilus > desktop. Here, you would be able to view a key named, volumes_visible in the right hand side pane. Uncheck this key.

As soon as you uncheck this key, the removable drive icons will disappear from your Ubuntu desktop.

In case you are thinking it would become difficult for you to access the drives if the desktop icons are hidden, then you are wrong. You can easily access these drives by opening the “Computer” icon. It can also be accessed from the file browser.